[April Brown] Hello everyone, my name is April
Brown and I'm the Digital Outreach Coordinator for the Archaeological Conservancy. And I’d like
to welcome you all to our virtual lecture. We have a great group from all across the nation tonight,
so welcome everyone. Our presenter this evening um is the executive is executive director of
the Gault School for Archaeological Research, as well as the Project Director for the research.
pre-history research project at the University of Texas Austin and you probably remember him from
his fall lecture the Gault Site and the Peopling of the Americas and he's going to continue on
that theme tonight as he shares an Introduction to the American Upper Paleolithic as well as
some of the latest research on the topic. So, welcome Dr. Wernecke. Welcome
back. Thank you for coming tonight. [Dr. Wernecke] Well thanks for having me again.
Well good evening and thanks for all of you for signing in to listen to this talk. Uh before we
get started, I wanted to make one thing really clear. This talk is not a guide for idiots, but
rather a guide by an idiot- me. I am a generalist. I have made a career out of organizing large
archaeological projects. And while I’ve helped head up a series of projects looking at the
peopling of the Americas for the last 23 years, I'm not a lithic analyst or a geneticist or
a linguist or a physical anthropologist. Um what I'd like to do is give you kind of a layman's
overview of the current research into the earliest peoples in the Americas and while I've definitely
chosen a side in some of the debates, I'm going to try to present some of the arguments from the
critics as well at least the serious scholarly critiques. To paraphrase Gary Haynes from his
book The early settlement of North America, it's impossible to talk about the first settlers
in the Americas without offending someone. At the end of my talk, I'll be happy to try
and answer questions, but keep in mind that I may only have broad answers to some of
those questions without technical detail. So, let me get my PowerPoint up here. Ah, there we go. Okay I want to talk briefly before I get into
the slides about the term Upper Paleolithic. Upper Paleolithic is a term that's used in
the rest of the world regarding the period roughly from 50 000 years ago till about 12 000
years ago. American archaeologists, for reasons I’ve never understood, have resisted bringing our
nomenclature in line with the rest of the world. No one's arguing that the first peoples in
the New World didn't come from the old world during the upper Paleolithic period, but
we've stubbornly stuck to our own terms. For a long time we thought that people arrived in
the Americas only about 4 000 years ago. In 1940 Frank Robert first used the term Paleo-Indian,
though only in a very general sense, and by the 1950s archaeologists were beginning to
define a Paleo-Indian time period usually divided into an early period including Clovis and Folsom
cultures and a later period. With more and more sites showing evidence of people here prior to the
early Paleo Indian period we run into a problem. Some speak of pre-Clovis or older than Clovis,
but this puts an emphasis on Clovis that's not justified. As if everything earlier must
be measured against Clovis. But if Clovis is not the first recognizable culture in
the Americas, then it's no more important than the cultures that followed it. It's not
a gold standard and since Clovis and Folsom are regarded as early Paleo-Indian, what do you
call anything earlier early, early Paleo-Indian? Pre-early Paleo-Indian? So that's why I'll
just call this the American Upper Paleolithic. We have to talk a little bit about terminology.
Before we wade into this topic, first I’d like to emphasize that with rare exceptions
archaeologists are looking at technology: things rather than people. It's what we do. We basically
look at garbage to figure out past human behavior. There's not much difference to us, except perhaps
smell between new garbage and old garbage. Now, if you go into a house and the kitchen and
baths are black and white and pink, how old is it? Some of you remember it's going to be late
50s early 60s, and you might remember after that turquoise, avocado, harvest gold, poppy
red, black almond, white stainless steel. Nobody ever asks me, “What
happened to the avocado people?” You know who you are. They became the harvest gold
people for the most part, but we get asked all the time, “Whatever happened to the Clovis people?”
The short answer is, there is no such thing. There is a Clovis technology, but we have
little idea what people or peoples used it. All the people we're going to be talking
about tonight. All the people we're talking about in the New World, are modern
humans. Homo sapiens, just like us. Collectively, they're not any dumber or
more primitive than all of us here tonight. Current scientific data points to modern humans’
origin in Africa followed by out-migration. Humans were thought to have gotten to
Europe around 50,000 years ago for instance that is until the publication of
data from Apidima Cave in Greece, with the oldest modern human dates
outside Africa 210,000 years ago, perhaps. Archaeological science, like all science,
is incremental. It's based on the best current data and our hypotheses, the ideas of what
occurred in the past, change as new data is found. Our story of the people of the Americas starts
with a Jesuit priest, Jose de A costa in 1590. Jose had spent 15 years in the New World in
South and Central America and he wrote about his experiences in a book: The Natural and Moral
History of the Indies. The book became the best seller of the day. People were very curious
about the New World and it was translated and printed widely. And in it he speculated on
where the people in the New World had come from. First, he knew as a priest that all humans
were descended from Noah and his family in central Asia, so they must have come from there.
He looked at whether they'd come by land or sea and he decided that people were too primitive.
His major argument was they lacked the compass to have come by boat. He also noted that
the New World had some Old World animals, especially wolves that he noted. And since
only an idiot would put a wolf in a boat, Jose decided that humans and animals must have
walked here somehow. In 1614, Edward Berwick's work on languages reinforced this idea. His book
was actually published posthumously by a son, but it was still being quoted a century later.
A number of popular writers at the time had been tossing out the idea that Native Americans
were descended to the lost tribes of Israel or Phoenicians or they had a lot of theories like
that. A lot of hypotheses and Burwood's work discounted this notion. He thought they were
more likely related to the Tartars of Crimea, making them of Asian ancestry. So that pretty
much takes us up to this guy, Thomas Jefferson. You might recognize him, who we regard as the
father of American archaeology. In the 1780s, in response to a questionnaire from France, he wrote
a book Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and one of the things he did was scientifically
excavate a burial mound near his home, recording the various strata that he
discovered. The various layers of this mound. And in this book he actually speculated on
the origin of the inhabitants of the Americas he concluded that well one there was really no
problem with people getting here by boat. Uh he also concluded there was really no problem with
them getting here from Europe. He also thought that there was probably little or no distance
between the continents of Asia and North America, and he also decided that there seemed to be a
resemblance between Native Americans and those in northeast Asia, which a study of language might
clarify. But he's definitely leaning towards Asia. By the 19th century, we'd pretty much decided
that modern humans had come from somewhere else and that Asia looked like a good bet. We
still had two big questions to resolve: when did people get here and how?
By what route did they get here? And there were a lot of false starts. Dr. Charles
Abbott was a medical doctor and a naturalist who took up archaeology on his farm in Trenton,
New Jersey. He was impressed by the early stone tools coming out of gravels in France and was uh
also filled with a little bit of nationalist zeal, and he was convinced he had the same thing
in the river gravels of the Delaware Valley. William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian
basically ripped his head off saying he was equating primitive with old. But then
the Peabody Museum at Harvard was intrigued enough to send an archaeologist, Ernest Falks, who
worked with Abbott for 20 years, also basically concluding that the tools he was finding were not
that old. But Holmes wasn't alone in this attitude towards researchers professional or amateur.
His colleague at the Smithsonian, Dr. Aleš Hrdlička often attacked any idea that man
in the New World was older than 4 000 years. This quote is actually from an official
biography obit at his death by one of his friends and even his friends say he steadfastly clung to
and passionately fought for this conclusion at the end of his life, even in view of evidence
demanding a reconsideration of the problem. Hrdlička and other conservative researchers
were powerful checks on anyone who speculated about anything older they controlled
basically the journals and the jobs. In 1927 Frank Hibben from the Denver Museum found
stone projectile points in association with bison known to have become extinct by 10,000 years
ago near Folsom, New Mexico. He left them in situ (in place) and had other researchers come
and take a look and they agreed that the find was scientifically valid. Later Edgar Howard, working
in Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, found what he called cruder projectile points
with remains of mammoth, horse, and bison. Blackwater Draw is the type site for the Clovis
culture, which was later determined to be older than Folsom. And in 1936, whoops skip ahead here
a little, and in 1936 Junius Bird, working in Southern Chile found what are now called fishtail
points in association with extinct horse. I want to emphasize that these fishtail points are
similar in age to the Clovis culture in the north. We'll come back to that later. There was now no
doubt that people were in the new world prior to 10,000 years ago. In recent years very vocal
critics have taken up Aleš Hrdlička crusade to block further scientific inquiry. In this case
a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who apparently understands neither the incremental nature of
science nor archaeology thought it worthwhile to comment on not only is this statement a
logical fallacy but it also ignores the data. In 1806 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark you
might have heard of Lewis and Clark vaguely found these Clovis points
at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. The Clovis culture was not defined until
nearly 150 years later because they didn't have good context for the points, and they had
no way to properly date material at the time. Context is everything. Clovis materials were found
for hundreds of years prior to the definition of Clovis, just like older materials have undoubtedly
been found for those same years without context. Not that there wasn't early dissent.
Frederick Wright published Man in the Glacial Period in 1892, speculating about earlier dates.
Alex Krieger, in 1964, published lists of sites in both North and South America he thought might be
older in a book Prehistoric Man in the New World. There was scant evidence at the time but the data
in hand seemed to point toward an earlier process, but we needed a lot more work on it. After
the fines at Clovis, Folsom, and Fell's Cave, the story of the people in the Americas changed
from that of people coming here 4,000 years ago to people coming 13,500 years ago. And this story,
like the one before it, became institutionalized; for all purposes, set in stone and we taught it
to our elementary school children. And we still teach it to our elementary school children. Clovis
represented the first people in the New World. But there's always been a
problem with that hypothesis. This is by far not a complete map of the current
data, but even so it shows some tendencies. This is a find of Clovis fluted points in the
United States and it certainly looks like Clovis, rather than starting in the Northeast and making
its way to the Southeast, spread in the opposite direction. Coupled with that is that researchers
have been unable to find anything like Clovis technology in Siberia. In fact it looks as
if floated fluted point technologies made it back that way from the Americas to Siberia about
12,000 years ago, going the other direction. There was also a propensity in North America
to ignore any data from South America. Those pesky fishtail points first found by Junius
Bird seem to have dates comparable to Clovis. If you have cultures in South America and
cultures in North America with the same dating, neither of those are likely to be first.
There's probably a precursor to both of them. In 1929 an avocational archaeologist Ridgely
Whiteman found fluted points that associated with mammoth remains in Blackwater Draw. It's
it's actually just outside Portales, New Mexico. E.B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania Museum took a look at the site in 1932
and returned to excavate there in 1933. Clovis points excavated in 1936 became the
type specimens for what was initially called the Llano complex. Finally, there was some
context to Lewis and Clark’s find from 1806. The definitive find of human-made artifacts with
extinct animals at Folsom in 1926 and later at Blackwater Draw proved that humans were in
the New World prior to 10,000 years ago. And even though there were researchers who thought
that people had been here much earlier, there was a lack of definitive proof. The story taught to
most of you as children and still taught to many was that Clovis technology represented
the first people in the New World. And I’ve already mentioned several problems with
that idea, but the inconsistencies were ignored. Depending on which data you've chosen to believe
we may or may not be in another paradigm shift, just like the one that happened when we decided
the four thousand year old date didn't fit the data. That shift wasn't instantaneous Hrdlička and
others went to their graves arguing against it. Science, however, advances through consensus.
As even Hrdlička's friend Schultz recognized in his obituary, when enough data exists
for consensus, science changes with it. So what kind of data currently exists? Well, okay,
if we're gonna just look at some archaeological sites then we're gonna need to discuss something
really important. The rules of evidence. What constitutes proof to other scientists
that you have what you claim to have? Human-made artifacts, ideally ones
that no one can doubt or quibble about. Good geology and stratigraphy, demonstrating
that the archaeological materials are where they are for good reason and where they should
be for the rest of the evidence to make sense. Good context. Not just the place, but from what
soil. What strata? Found with what else? Context is everything. Think of archaeologists as CSI
prehistoric. We all know removing or missing one artifact from a murder scene can change
everything. The same is true in archaeology. You need everything exactly with everything
else in good context. And lastly, we need good scientific dates. Generally, when we're talking
about this we mean absolute calendar dates and not relative dates. Preferably a large number, and if
possible from a variety of techniques and labs. The best case is the calendar dates and the
relative dates of materials from the surface down coincide to show a well-dated site.
Okay, so that brings us to some data, and in this case we're going to start with Monte
Verde. It wasn't the first find of older material, but it was the first to get a consensus. Monte
Verde is near Puerto Moncelli, near the south end of the Western Hemisphere, way down near
the pointy bit. The site itself was found in 1975 and excavations led by Tom Dillehay of
Vanderbilt University began at the site in 1977. Prior to publication of the archaeology Dillehay
arranged a site visit by nine researchers with, as we say here in Texas, a dog in the hunt.
Three researchers from South America and six from North America with disparate
ideas about the people in the Americas. Later that year they published
an article about the site, accepting it as a site with dates older than
the early Paleo-Indian dates in North America. Now Monte Verde has at least two occupations
and perhaps three, the youngest dates to 14,800 years ago and is what everyone
agreed on when they went down there. There are some indications, hearths and a
few tools, of an occupation 18,300 years ago not everyone believes in. And an even more
ephemeral indication of something around 33,000 years ago that no one likes to talk about
The summary of the consensus article might confuse some, because they state the date
and radio carbon years about 12,500. When you calibrate the date you get around 14,800 despite
this group of prestigious scientists agreeing not everyone jumped on board. There have been
many critiques a recent article dismisses it, because they say they're only about six
tools that people agree or artifacts. I would argue that highly respected
lithic analysts disagree with that, but when did quantity become a rule of evidence?
I was telling someone the other day if I find uh a Coke can on the surface of the moon, I can pretty
much guess that people brought it there. And even if you didn't like or understand the stone tools,
what about the structures that were found there? The foundation of a tent like structure 60 feet
long and a small horseshoe shaped structure? What do you make of the small sharpened
poles of those structures having vegetal matter tied to them? You can see a knot in
this picture. The remains of hide clothing, edible seaweeds that came from a coastline
that was 55 miles away to the west at the time. From a preserved piece of a gompothere. How do
you explain the human footprint found in the sediments? When we examine archaeological, sites
we can't pick and choose our rules of evidence. We must examine them all together Monte Verde
has undoubtable signs of human occupation with good stratigraphy, in good context,
and with accepted scientific dates. About 80 miles north of Monteverde, near
Osorono, Chile the site of Pilauco Bajo also has lithics and megafauna with similar dates.
Prior to work at Monte Verde there was the site of Taima-Taima in Venezuela and later Tibitó in
Colombia. Both of these appear to be mastodon on butchering sites. Taima-Taima was excavated,
well it was found in 1962 and excavated over a number of years, and it's located around an
artesian spring-fed waterhole where there was a juvenile mastodon found with stone tools and
a stone projectile point within the pelvis. Taima-Taima has been baited to
dated just 15 to 16,000 years ago. The critique of this site is centered around
the provenience of the bone and stone tools, with some claiming they may have been moved around
by water or may have moved through the soils. Tibitó is located on the Bogota
plain in Colombia over 8 000 feet above sea level. It's an ancient rock
shelter with the remains of mastodon, horse, and a number of other animals in it.
There's a large quantity of bone and stone tools, and signs of butchering, breaking, and burning
on many of the bones. Unfortunately there is but one radiocarbon date over 13,000 years, so
the site's often rejected as not well dated. Huaca Prieta is located on the coast of Peru
and excavations there were conducted by Tom Dillehay from 2006 through 2011. Huaca
Prieta means “black pyramid” and is the site of a very large pyramid of the Chavin
culture, about 2,200 to 3,000 years old. Full disclosure, the Gault School of
Archaeological Research was involved with lithic analysis for both Monte Verde and Huaca Prieta.
I told you I’ve pretty much already chosen sides! Huaca Prieta is not only located on
the coast, but it's at a river delta. One of the best places to set up if you're a
hunter and gatherer. You know you have saltwater, freshwater, swamp, high ground to choose from.
The archaeologists excavated a number of areas along the river terraces, including two they
went through 32 meters that's about 105 feet of later deposits to get to very old river terraces.
There they found stone tools and dates to nearly 15,000 years ago. The people who lived on
the coast 15,000 years ago were, surprise, utilizing a lot of marine resources. But they
also found evidence of deer from the foothills and the earliest evidence of avocado use in
this hemisphere. Ceviche and guacamole anyone? So, those are some of the better known sites. Some
only better known because they were excavated by North American archaeologists and they're but a
drop in the bucket. If this was a semester-long class we might have time to go over all the
sites of interest now. It's quite a long list. And if you look at the range of dates to
the lower right there you'll note that many of them are very early. The authors of this
article were helpful enough to give us some idea when people could have walked to North America.
Down in the right corner there you can see that little line- ice free corridor open- and these
sites predate the possibility of walking here. In addition, most are of Clovis age or older,
making it impossible for Clovis to be the predecessor of these technologies. There had to
be a technology these and Clovis derived from. For a long time, the idea was promoted that
humans moved into a new pristine world, killing everything before them and as game
became scarce, advancing forward in search of food. The first problem with this idea is
that data supports the idea that these people were all broad spectrum hunters and gatherers.
They didn't pass up easy foods or plant foods. If you look on the Internet for information on big
game hunting cultures it refers you to Clovis and Folsom. If you look for proof that Clovis is
representative of big game hunting it refers you to Folsom and vice versa. A little circular
reasoning. It's not really possible for people to live on big game hunting alone. We've never
actually seen a culture that exists that way. There's also a lot of data, if only you look for
it, that plants and small animals- shellfish, bats, birds, insects were driven to extinction at
the same time, which implies that something larger than bloodlust is involved. A dramatic climate
change. People who reached Australia apparently lived alongside megafauna for twenty to thirty
thousand years and new data is appearing that some of these animals may have been around a lot
longer than we previously thought. For instance, a recent publication suggests that there were
mammoths in the Yukon until 5000 years ago. This idea also posits a very small starting
population, around 100, and there are a lot of arguments about how many people you need for a
viable population, with good arguments from 160 to 14,000. There's no agreement on this at all. It's
a problem that we often treat the peopling of the New World as an event where it's more likely to
have been a process. It's not just one people, you know one one group coming over and
planting a flag and peopling the New World. Okay let's look at North America. The Wisconsin Glacial Episode lasted from 75,000
years to about 11,000 years ago and massive ice sheets covered a great deal of northern North
America. At their maximum the Cordilleran ice sheet covered almost a million square miles
of the west from the mountains to the sea and the Laurentide ice sheet covered another
5 million square miles, up to 3 miles high. Up in the north, way up here, we have the
Mackenzie River Valley and around 16,000 years ago the ice began to melt, creating a little gap
between the two ice sheets. And a similar process started well way down in what's now Alberta. These
gaps would have been filled first with freezing water: first rivers, then paraglacial lakes, then
swamps, before widening enough to allow dry land. There's no evidence of animals or humans in
these gaps until about 12,500 years ago and no evidence that these gaps connected
prior to 12-13,000 thousand years ago. In other words, there was no 1,500 mile
long ice-free corridor to explain the earliest peoples of the Americas, even if you
still believe Clovis is what they left behind. South of the ice, there's a number of sites
to consider. The first one we'll look at is Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Western Pennsylvania.
Meadowcroft sits above the bank of Cross Creek, a tributary of the Ohio River, and it was first
discovered in 1955 by the landowner Albert Miller who protected it until 1973 when Dr.
Jim Adevacio came to excavate there. There were extensive excavations from 1973 to
1978 and sporadic excavations through to 2007, basically 11 years in total. The excavations were
painstakingly done, sometimes digging with razor blades, and continued down through materials
from a thousand years old to a roof collapse that happened somewhere around 13- 14,000 years
ago. The excavations continued down about 16 feet and found materials from human occupation
that date between 16 and 19,000 years ago. Artifacts included a basket fragment and an
in-situ projectile point were found near the bottom of those units. Dates came from carbon 14
dates on charcoal and the basket fragment, and the greatest critique of the site was that these were
probably contaminated by coal in the water table repeated tests by the excavation group
have shown no such contamination. Let's take a closer look at Cactus Hill. It's
about 37 miles south of Richmond, Virginia. The site was an open pit sand mine.
It was first discovered in the 1980s by an avocational collector. Subsequently,
Joseph McAvoy of the Nottoway River Survey and Mike Johnson with members of the
Archaeological Society of Virginia excavated here, starting with a test by McAvoy in 1988 and
substantial excavations by both groups between 1993 and 2002. Cactus hill has a well-dated Clovis
component including projectile points and in areas a and b, artifacts below the Clovis strata
with dates of 18 to 20,000 years ago. The Clovis component is discrete and undisturbed.
Below a 7 to 20 centimeter sterile zone the researchers at Cactus Hill found more stone
tools, but they're quite different from the Clovis occupation above them. Phosphate, an indicator
of human presence, was found in the soil. Even better, the carbon 14 and luminescent soil
dates are in agreement. Critiques have often been based on the fact that the soil is sandy, so
artifacts may have moved down through the soils. Micromorphological analysis showed the Cactus
Hill had multiple buried surface horizons that are spatially and temporally discreet. Oh yeah,
and there's no sign of mixing or downward movement above it, and the assemblage below Clovis is
not Clovis technology. While not even close to definitive, it is intriguing that we're
beginning to see some artifacts that at least morphologically look alike. I actually don't
know of an in-depth technological analysis yet. The Miller Point was found at Meadowcroft and
some similar artifacts at a site downstream the early deposits at Cactus Hill have a similar
looking point, and others have come from along the Nottoway River nearby. The artifact from
old deposits at Miles Point on Chesapeake Bay also looks similar to one found on the 18,000 year
old Delmarva shoreline underwater in the Atlantic. Archaeologists look for patterns of human
behavior and perhaps we're starting to see some. Let's jump all the way to the West coast
to look at Paisley Caves in Western Oregon. This site was first discovered by the father
of Oregon archaeology, Luther Cressman, who worked there in 1939 and found extinct
animals: horses and camels with stone tools. His colleagues at the time cast doubt on his finds
because of course, people had only been here for 4,000 years. The site is a series of caves
just above an ancient lakebed. And in 2002, Dr. Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon
went back to the caves to test Crestman's idea that early humans were living alongside and
hunting now extinct horses, camels, and bison. Several of the caves were painstakingly excavated
and news reports proliferated when the team found coprolites. Well, we have to have a different word
for everything so human turds that dated back to 14,300 years old. Now critiques of the site
are primarily focused on those coprolites, that perhaps they were younger than the
sediments they were in. Or, maybe not even human. The first test of these looked for human DNA and
dated the organics in them. The researchers went back to look at lipids, fatty acids in the samples
that are less likely to move around in the soil and conveniently can also be directly
dated, and got similar results. Even so, they found modified
bone and fauna with butchering with similar ages and stone tools with
proteins on them from mammoths and horses. We've looked at east and west so
now let's look at the Midwest. At the Schaefer and Habior mammoth sites.
Schaefer was found in 1964 by a backhoe driver putting in drain tile and Habior was found in
1994 just a quarter mile away. Dan Joyce of the Kenosha Public Museum excavated there in
1992 and 93 and found 80% of a woolly mammoth disarticulated and in piles. Two small chert
tools were found and the skeleton had numerous cut and wedge marks on it. It had definitely
been butchered. Imagine their surprise when they got dates back of 14,500 years ago. Just down
the road, literally within sight of Schaefer, another mammoth was found and this time it was
95% complete. David Overstreet excavated in 1994 and found not only tools, but once again, very
clear cut marks on the bones. You can see some of those in the lower left picture. Habior
dated 150 to 200 years older than Schaefer. Well, we've done east, west, north so we'll
head south to look a bit at the Gault and Deborah Friedkin sites in Central Texas.
Now, I’m a hundred percent biased here as I have worked at Gault since 1999 and hit up our
non-profit as well as the research in the lab I can tell you we did not excavate gall looking
for evidence of the people in the Americas we were there because dr Michael Collins is one
of the leading experts on the Clovis culture and Gault has lots of Clovis evidence more than
600 000 uh artifacts from that culture alone the site's been known since 1929 and a brief
test excavation was done there in 1991. Gault is actually in the flood
plain of Buttermilk Creek, a tributary of the Salado River. It's
about 40 miles north of Austin, Texas. In this picture you could just see a fence in the
valley. The gate’s right in front of that burn pile you can see down in down the valley and the
Deborah L. Friedkin site is less than 300 meters, about 800 feet, down the street from this gate,
just over the trees to the left of that burn pile. There were many excavations on the site
over a period of about 11 years. We looked at an estimated three percent of the site and
recovered 2.6 million artifacts from 22 cultures. Our last excavation was in response to finds deep
in some test units that we dug to show some of our colleagues the geology of the site. Above bedrock
and well below Clovis we found stone tools where they really shouldn't be. A 56 square meter unit
was started in 2007. You can see area 15 here in this picture and it was designed to step in twice
to avoid anything dropping down in the lower areas and expose an area on the underlying bedrock
to see what was going on there. In doing so we found 130,000 artifacts that predate
the Clovis culture 16 to 18,000 years old. In 2018 we published an article in science
advances regarding the geology and dating at Gault. It's open source so you can find it
online and read it. The monograph regarding the Clovis and older components should go to the
publisher this year, with much more detail, so you'll probably see it in about two years.
Since we do not yet have enough information to describe a culture or cultures, because cultures
are patterns of human behavior, we preliminarily called the oldest material the Gault assemblage
and it's significantly different technologically than the Clovis materials above it. And nothing
is moving down through all the other cultural layers to get to the to that depth and we
show that rather definitively in the article. It would literally take me days to go into greater
detail about these sites, and others like these, that have data to add to the discussion. Triquet
Island has good dates on hearths 14,000 years old while Calvert Island has 29 human
footprints at least 13,000 years old. Recent years have seen the publication of
old artifacts at Cooper's Ferry in Idaho and Chikuita Cave in Mexico very recently.
Researchers published on human footprints interspersed with Pleistocene animals at
White Sands, New Mexico 23,000 years old. Well what about early, early man the Cerutti
Mastodon is dated at about 130,000 years old and Calico Hills which Louis Leakey claimed
was a 100,000 years old. Smart scientists learn to never say never. Today's absolute could be
disproved tomorrow with new data. We do, however, have established rules of evidence and currently,
well maybe perhaps it's like Lewis and Clark's Clovis points, there's just not enough evidence
definitively show a human presence earlier. Okay, so how did they get here? Wow, okay, this is
the touchiest subject. For a long time we believed the first peoples in this hemisphere walked
here. And no one’s disputing that later on both people and animals walked both directions,
but if people were here 25 to 30,000 years ago they couldn't have walked here and that's
when it starts to get messy. To get here prior to that you have to come along the coast
in boats. So some of my loudest colleagues shout, “Where are the boats?” I’d like to think they're
kidding, because that's not a serious question. I showed a couple pictures here researchers with
the Black Sea Maritime Archaeological Project discovered the oldest known human ship,
a Greek ship 2,400 years old, in 2017. No one doubted the Greeks had ships prior
to that since there was other evidence like trade items to support the idea. The oldest boat in the world right now is a
dugout canoe from the Netherlands around 10,000 years ago. So, what other evidence is there?
Well, people arrived in Australia somewhere between 50 and 65,000 years ago and they'd
crossed almost 60 miles of water to get there. 25,000 years ago we found people in Japan
using obsidian from Kazushima island. In that lower picture that black stripe is not a
shadow, that's actually obsidian and Kazushima island is 30 miles from the mainland.
You know I guess we're suggesting somebody swam with a big obsidian rock under each arm. People
getting to the island of Crete 130,000 years ago needed some kind of watercraft, as did the
early hominids in Flores, Indonesia. Skin and bone boats still used today in the Arctic.
Umiacs have a tremendous capacity. This photo shows somewhere between 20 and 22 people, I lost
track in the middle (it's hard to distinguish) and it leaves no archaeological signature. It's
made of skin and bone. If the weather gets rough, modern whale and seal hunters simply pull
the boat onto the ice and use it as a tent. A British journalist with two companions
made a journey from Ireland where they have a similar boat building tradition to
the New World. Three guys in a skin boat. There are three major hypotheses right now:
the land bridge (that's the hypothesis we were talking about before, that people walked here),
coastal migration or the kelp highway hypothesis, and the Solutrean hypothesis. There's no evidence
of crossings through the Pacific. Much of the people in the Pacific islands was about 1,200
years ago. Nor is there any evidence of direct contact with Africa. If the first peoples got to
this hemisphere prior to the opening of a corridor between the Cordilleran and the Laurentian ice
sheets then that leaves us with two choices: along the Pacific or Atlantic coast in boats or
both. This is a process and not a true false test. Traveling along the North Atlantic ice sheet may
even be a shorter distance than the Pacific route. There are migrating birds and seals moving along
this ice front as well as the now extinct auk and since all of these species have to have
dry land, any moderately attentive hunter could make the connection that there was
more to the West than just water and ice. It's not an especially difficult trip, despite
what some people think. In addition to our British journalists, more than 156 solo rowers
have done it in modern times. In 1563 a group of people stranded in South Carolina built a homemade
boat and most of them survived to get to England. Inuit, probably from Greenland, landed in
Scotland in 1682 and in the early 18th century. So is it possible? Well, the answer is
yes! people could easily have done it. Now, I’m not going to get into the details of
the Solutrean hypothesis here, but let me say if you quit calling it Solutrean and just think
about possible migration from what's now Europe, there is a possibility and hypotheses
should be tested not dismissed out of hand. We'll talk a little bit about genetics
in a minute. The biggest controversy here is that neo-Nazis hailed this as “white
people were here first”, despite the fact that genetics for white skin is only about 9,000 years
old, so the knee-jerk reaction for many people is, “Oh gosh, not from Europe. That's just a big
can of worms.” Traveling along the Pacific Coast is certainly possible and relatively easy if
uh perhaps a bit longer. There would have been refugia (areas free of ice along the coast).
We have some very early occupations of the area places like Triquet and Calvert islands we
find the remains of bears along that route in the Pleistocene and bears actually need
a lot of food. They need a pretty good area. There's evidence for people fishing from Cedros
Island off of Baja California 11,000 years ago and some of the earliest human remains
On Your Knees cave and Arlington Spring are found along the Western coast. What
we don't have is definitive evidence. Archaeological sites that would be located on
the Atlantic or Pacific coast in the Pleistocene would be under water today. One argument against
any migration from the east is based on lithic analysis. There are major disagreements here,
but suffice it to say, not everyone sees similarities. Well, we have the same problem
when we look at the west. The technologies in Alaska and Siberia look nothing like those
that appear later in the rest of the Americas. Yes, okay, you say that. We get that. But
didn't they figure it all out with DNA? The short answer is no, they haven't and
here's some of the reasons why. We see a lot of graphics like this one that make it seem
pretty obvious, but they leave off all the bits that might get in the way. For instance, there
was an early migration all the way to Greenland around 4,500 years ago, and a later
migration by people not genetically related. This graphic simplifies it by ignoring
that and making it one migration. It's important to remember that the peopling in
the New World again was a process not an event and as a process is likely to be complex. One
of the problems we run into is that genetically dating something is filled with assumptions: how
long a generation is, what the mutation rate was, and that makes it a horrible yardstick. So the
best thing to do for geneticists is to combine it with a culture you already know the dates
of to give you some markers along the way. Commonly they throw in the child burial at Anzick,
as they do here, and say that that burial was found with Clovis artifacts and therefore Anzick
is representative of Clovis. Unfortunately, the first archaeologist to visit the anzac sit, Dee
Taylor, a professor at the University of Montana, wrote of the site, quote, “The material was
unearthed in such a way that data from several levels could have become thoroughly mixed now we
can never actually prove that artifacts and bones were definitely associated together in the
site.” The geneticists have been using this just took later archaeologists
assurances that they were associated and there are some dating problems at the Anzick
site, as well, that you could read up on your own. So Anzick is not demonstratively Clovis, and I’m
sure we could all agree that one person's DNA is representative of everyone who lived at the
time right ? Wait wait… what? No, that doesn't make sense. I got my DNA done and sure as heck
doesn't tell me where my neighbor's from, does it? Well what about Clovis? This technology
we have assumed represented the first peoples in the Americas. Anthropologically the
Clovis culture doesn't make a lot of sense. So we're saying there are all these
little regional cultures in the Old World, no matter where you think immigrants came from,
and then there's this monolithic culture from Canada to Venezuela for a time and then we're
back to a bunch of little regional cultures. We've also long recognized but not spoken
about much the regional variations that we see both in the assemblages from this time
as well as the supposedly diagnostic points we've long talked about: Western fluted
points, the Eastern fluted tradition, that certainly have some general
technological and morphological similarities but they're not the same. These pictured
here are all Clovis points from Texas and they certainly look quite different
and they're actually made differently. We also don't have much
genetic material to work with. I’m sure I missed some here, but here are
27 sets of remains older than 9,000 years and the oldest are probably 10 to 15,000 years
younger than the first immigrants. There are estimates as high as 40 million deaths in the
New World after the arrival of the Spanish. That's a lot of missing DNA. Comparing DNA
to modern populations can tell you if they're related, but it can't tell you anything
about populations that no longer exist. There's also another problem that has to
do with haplogroups of mitochondrial DNA. That's generally what we see
maps of, like this one here. I want you to note the dotted line across the
top of the map- route unknown. This is the x haplogroup which is found most frequently in
Europe and Eastern North America. Some years ago there were publications saying, “ Uh, we fixed
this. x and the first peoples of the Americas came from the area of the Altai mountains, northwestern
Mongolia and we find it in populations there.” The problem is that the X haplogroup in the
Altai is only about 9,000 years old and Mongolia is still a long ways from the New World.
Here's a recent publication looking at a different aspect of DNA: shared alleles. In three
skeletons 42,000- 45 000 years old in Bulgaria. The warmer the color on the map, the more shared
genetic drift. Some of these skeletons in Bulgaria are closer to Native Americans than they
are to individuals from Central Asia. By the way, the population of Europe has been
replaced at least three times in the last 14,000 years, so there's a lot of problems, not just
in the Altai mountains, with comparing modern to ancient populations. We only mapped the human
genome in 2003, and great strides have been made in understanding it, but there's still a lot
of things we don't know. There's some really great people sequencing ancient samples but we
have a limited sample of ancient DNA. Molecular divergence can precede population divergence.
We're missing a lot of lineages. We're assuming genetically distinctive source populations. We're
assuming that individuals are representative of a population. We're assuming that instantaneous
change happens with no subsequent gene flow. Mutation rates are based on little data. The
average generational age is based on little data. Recombination and then we also
assume that populations are panoctic, meaning that all individual pairs are
equally likely to mate. In other words, there's still a lot to sort out. I’m sure perhaps
in my lifetime they'll get a lot better data. Most importantly, what you should take home from
today's talk, is heightened skepticism. Skepticism is healthy, and it's part of science. Watch the
language. There are code words that should wave large red flags in your head and the following
examples are all from recent publications. I like this one- “this
study oops this study proves or we prove”. The scientific method does not prove
things. We try to disprove them, and then even if much of our data might suggest that something is
otherwise. “Prove” is a very definitive word. I really like this one “conclusively shows”. Really,
beyond the shadow of a doubt? Conclusively shows? “Does not support” Okay, on the
surface this might seem okay, but it's a real weasel phrase here. Lots of things
don't support a hypothesis. The dirt on my shoe does not support the hypothesis that the ozone
layer of our atmosphere has been depleted. Nope, you know it does not but so what? There's
a lot of things that don't support things. “Refutes the possibility” Oh, this is reserved
for when you have a real axe to grind with a colleague. This is not only wrong, it's impossible
for it to ever be right. When you see phrases like this I want you to think of me using my most
sarcastic tone and going “Really? Really?” So, read these things and then start thinking about
it. What we have now is enough data to say, “There seems to be an awful lot of smoke, so we
really ought to watch out for the fire.” I’m sure my listeners in the in the west uh know
that that one's a really important one. We have no definitive answers right
now but we have lots of indications that the old hypotheses don't work just like we
rejected people being here only 4,000 years ago. It's time to let go of 13,500 years ago as well
and look for more data and test new hypotheses. So again, with that my thanks to the Conservancy
for inviting me back, and for all of you for joining me tonight. I’m going to try to answer
some of your questions to the best of my ability, but I’m going to remind you again- I’m an idiot! So give it your best shot, and we'll
see if we can answer some of these. [April Brown] That was great, Clark, thank you.
There's your graduate seminar, minus some stuff. Okay we have a handful of questions.
[Dr. Wernecke] Just a handful? [April Brown] Just a handful right now. We'll
see how that goes. But we have like five- ten minutes tops, anyway. So,
[Dr. Wernecke] All right, we went we went a long time that's good.
[April Brown] No, it was fantastic! Um, so one of the questions was, someone asked,
“How can you have, how can you establish that an artifact is unquestionably human made?”
[Dr. Wernecke] Oh boy, um that's something I almost have to show you rather than
tell you. Uh you know when you find a sharpened stake with rope tied on it, I
think we can agree that's human-made. Uh most stone tools, we can actually show you
through lithic analysis exactly how it was made and you know they're they're more complex
than can happen other ways. I mean nature can mimic some stone tools, sometimes, but
you find a whole lot of them- they're human made. There's a lot of things like that that you
really have to look at the stuff in the lab to be able to definitively tell you
why we think they're human-made, but a lot of them are pretty obvious to most of us.
[April Brown] Okay, another question is, “How is it determined that phosphates identified
at Meadowcroft aren't from some other mammal?” [Dr. Wernecke] Ah, well as I understand it,
phosphates and phosphorus and stuff basically come from human activity areas. Um I may be wrong
in that again I have a soil scientist that I’m working with right now. I knew of about three
of the tests that I wanted done on soil samples. He sent me a list of 23 and I have
no idea what the other ones do, so I have to sit down with him and go through
it. It's not a question I can answer well. I’m an idiot!
[April Brown] Okay, um let's see here. The next question um, Patricia says she read an article a while
back proposing that the diversity of indigenous languages along the Pacific Coast supports
the theory of migration along the west coast. What do you think?
[Dr. Wernecke] It can support one hypotheses, yeah, although it
depends on how you look at that diversity. Again, linguistics is not my field, but when you look
at that stuff there's a lot of discussions about how to examine diversity in languages and I don't
know that actually there's a definitive answer there. Even in their field
linguists don't all agree on that. There's very old linguistic evidence that
everybody thought, “Oh that's going to support the Clovis thing.” and for years people
have been punching holes in that and saying, “Well this doesn't work and this doesn't work and
it was poorly done.”, so I’m not sure that we have a definitive way of saying that with linguistics.
[April Brown] We have another person who asked, “What is the
oldest secure date from the Gault site so far?” [Dr. Wernecke] Uh, the oldest secure date, well
human date, is around 18,000 years ago. You can see our Science Advances article. It's it's open
source, so if you go to Science Advances and just put Gault in the search thing it'll come up and
and you can read the uh information about the dating of the site.
[April Brown] Okay, someone asked, “Has there been any research
that attributes typology of pre-Clovis tools?] [Dr. Wernecke] Um, repeat that again.
[April Brown] Um, any research that attributes typology of pre-Clovis tools?
[Dr. Wernecke] Um, I mean we're researching the technology of these things but when you're talking
typology again you're talking about patterns um and I can't compare, say stuff from Gault to
Monte Verde. They're thousands of years apart. They're thousands of years, thousands of miles
apart. Um trying to compare those things is not a good idea. You need things that are nearby,
and that's why I noted those Miller points. It's intriguing. It's not yet definitive, but at
least those are closer together. We're talking Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania, you know.
Maybe there's something there and as we find more stuff maybe we'll find out that we do have
a typology. Maybe, maybe there is something there that we can say, “Hey, there's this culture.
In this culture.” I know we got called on the carpet by one person not long ago who said in our
arrogance we're calling this the Gault assemblage and I tried to make it really clear we're only
calling it the Gault assemblage internally because we don't have a cultural name for it
and I don't have other sites in Texas to compare it to. We actually excavate 10 to 15 sites here
in Texas every year, looking for that comparable material and if I can find other sites with
similar dates similar geology similar tools then I can start talking about patterns and
maybe we can start getting into typology It's a good question.
[April Brown] We have another person who asked, “Why do
projectile points change styles over time?” [Dr. Wernecke] Why did your appliances in your
kitchen change over time? Why does your phone change every year now? That's just humans being
humans. You know the the harvest gold dishwasher didn't work much better than the avocado
dishwasher. They were only like two years apart. There weren't vast technological changes, but
suddenly we decided avocado’s, out we need harvest gold and you just replace those appliances.
Nowadays it happens very very quickly. We have instantaneous communication worldwide and trends
can come and go in a week, but in the past it's a lot slower. People see something from another
culture, perhaps it's traded to them or something, go “that's the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! I
wonder how I could make one of those?” and start adapting something else. Later on, people just
start adapting different things to differentiate themselves from the other guys over the ridge.
[April Brown] Do you have any thoughts on rock art evidence related to this area?
[Dr. Wernecke] Well, Gault has incised stone, the oldest ones of which are of Clovis age
with geometric designs on it and those are representative of the first art in the Americas.
I I am of the opinion that if you don't look for them, you won't find them, and we're finding that
to be more and more true as people start finding them elsewhere not only in old collections.
When they go back and look uh we have stuff here in Texas from Kincaid Rock Shelter of Clovis
age and Wilson Leonard of Clovis age. The folks that are working in Trinil, Indonesia on stuff
450 000 years old actually quoted the article we did in American Antiquity about incised
stones and said as Lemke and Wernecke said, “If you don't look for it, you're not gonna
find it.” I’m convinced we'll find even more. [April Brown] Okay, um so this might be a
loaded question, but I’m going to ask you. [Dr. Wernecke] They're all loaded questions!
[April} Maybe! Why did you dismiss migrations from Africa?
[Dr. Wernecke] Because we have absolutely no evidence for them whatsoever.
Nothing genetically, nothing artifact-wise, nothing. Now, I told you that we never say
never, so maybe someday, I mean there's an awful lot of archaeology going on in South America
and maybe someday in Brazil they find something go wow this is weird. Although you have to remind
remember, too, that you need a bunch of people to do a migration, and have a viable population,
and the fact is is that we know historically of lots of people that ended up in the New World by
mistake. People that were shipwrecked here people that were driven off course and everything. There
are two guys that were shipwrecked in the Yucatan and they were Spanish and the Maya didn't become
Spanish. Those two Spanish guys became pretty Maya. One of them married the chief's daughter
and became a war chief in in the particular city he lived in, so yeah, you need a bunch of
people and we're just not seeing any evidence, so I dismiss it now.
[April Brown] Does the Friedkin site (I might
be saying that improperly) have any comparable early material to Gault?
[Dr. Wernecke] Yes they do. The Friedkin site has stuff that's 15,000 years old. They've also
published articles on it. It was excavated by a group from Texas A&M who worked with us at
Gault for two years and got an opportunity to work downstream from us and they have similar
stratigraphy, similar artifacts below Clovis. [April Brown] Okay, I think we still have a few
questions, but I actually think I’m gonna have to cut it off at some point we're going over
a little time here, um but I’m going to um somebody first of all someone asked if you give
talks on a regular basis because they love your the way you think. That was another question
and finally the last question I’ll let you cover um is um whether you're doing tours at the
Gault site. People are asking about that. [Dr. Wernecke] We actually have monthly
scheduled tours at the Gault site. Uh we have our on our website Gaultschool.org
we actually have a calendar that shows at least the ones for 2022 right now. We will also
schedule a site tour for any group of 10 or more if the calendar allows us to. As for talks,
I’ve done an awful lot of them this spring. I do them periodically, no place
that you can regularly find me, but oddly enough I was just looking
to look at my last Conservancy talk because April told me to look at the YouTube video
there and uh in searching for Gault I found about 25 videos I think with me either out at the site
talking or other things that people had recorded. So periodically I do. I’ve been known to teach
some classes down here for continuing education here in Texas and I speak when I’m asked.
[April Brown] Well, we certainly appreciated you coming
back tonight, so thank you very much and I apologize to everyone that we couldn't
get to all the questions, again, but um I will send them to Clark in and he'll see
all the questions if he wants to reach out to you guys and answer them individually so yep.
[Dr. Wernecke] And I’m seeing in the chat room lots of old Gault alumni, some that I
haven't seen in years, so hello everybody and thanks for all of your help.
[April Brown] Yeah and thank you all for coming tonight and we'll be announcing lecture
more lectures in the future so stay tuned and thank you very much. Have a great night!
[Dr. Wernecke] Yep, thank you.
